#1. Email Composition
Email composition encompasses all of the elements a contact interacts with once they receive the email.
Ensuring each of these elements is working towards the same goal will significantly increase an email’s overall performance.
Those elements are:
- Subject line and preview text
- Personalization tokens
- Body text
- Design
- CTA
- Unsubscribe
- Business contact
Avoid overuse of special characters and emojis in emails’ subject lines, as they may not translate well across every email platform and thus leave your subject line looking suspicious. The email’s preview text should further describe the email’s content.
Keep the subject line to 33 characters and the preview text to 37 characters.
A subject line could earn you a valuable open or a spam report. Almost 70% of spam reports are filed solely because of the subject line while almost 50% of email opens were due to the subject line.
Personalization tokens are autogenerated elements within an email that are hyper-personalized to the individual contact. Examples include the contact’s first name in the greeting, displaying a product currently in an abandoned cart, reminding them of their appointment or offering a coupon specifically curated to their shopping habits.
When initially gathering contact information, remember to ask for details like first and last names that could be used as personalization tokens.
An email’s body text doesn’t have to be lengthy paragraphs. Since email marketing is first and foremost a visual communication tool, keep body text to a few sentences, short product descriptions or a simple CTA button.
An email’s design communicates to the reader where to look and what’s the most important content within the email. Poor email design can lead to a messy and distracting email that earns higher bounce rates than click-through-rates.
An email’s CTA is the specific action the email is designed to encourage readers to take. Following the rules of segmentation, each email should have one clear CTA. An email’s CTA can be anything that adds value to your manufacturing business.
Giving readers the option to unsubscribe within every email is a legal requirement. Honoring contacts’ unsubscriptions will keep your manufacturing business in good legal standing and it will ultimately reflect well on your email marketing numbers.
Your manufacturing business’s mailing address needs to be included at the bottom of every email to comply with advertising legalities. It can’t be a P.O. Box; it needs to be the address of a physical location where your business can receive mail.
#2. Deliverability and Compliance
An email’s deliverability and legal compliance refer to a sender’s methods of acquiring email addresses, the level of opt-in contacts provided and ensuring all privacy and personalization in advertising laws are followed.
Read the full CAN-SPAM Act here.
#3. Campaigns and Flows
An email campaign is a set number of emails all designed to encourage a certain conversion. Campaigns can be automated and or individually crafted and scheduled.
An email flow is an automated series of emails triggered by certain actions a contact takes.
An example of an email flow is an abandoned cart flow.
When a contact is shopping on a website, if they add an item to their cart but don’t checkout, an email is triggered to send typically a few days later to remind them to purchase the item. If they purchase, the contact may exit the flow and enter a new flow, or, if they don’t purchase, they may receive more emails in the following days encouraging them to buy or consider similar products.
#4. Audience Segmentation
Audience segmentation is one of the most important elements of crafting an effective email marketing strategy. Audience segmentation entails assigning individual contacts certain attributes that group them together to be able to receive the same email with high efficacy.
For example, you can segment contacts into current clients, past clients and leads. You can further segment leads into hot, warm or cold leads. The more segmented your contact lists, the more personalized and effective your email campaigns can be.